Movie stunts come in all shapes and sizes, but no matter the scale, that doesn’t make them any less impressive. Whether it is riding something gasoline-fueled off a cliff or stuffing something live and deadly into your mouth, some actors are willing to go all the way, encouraging or, at the very least, entertaining their directors’ flair for authenticity and really showing up.

The result? Painstakingly crafted scenes that, while they may look staged, were actually filmed for real. But don’t just take our word for it…

Related: 10 Craziest Skydiving Scenes Hollywood Has Ever Produced

10 Man on Fire: Extraction 2 (2023)

Sam Hargrave’s straight-to-Netflix action thriller Man on Fire (2020) may have seemed a one-off action star vehicle for Chris Hemsworth at the time, but the popularity of both the original movie and this year’s sequel tell a different story.

With Hemsworth returning to the lead role, both he and Hargrave knew they had to keep upping the ante—especially in a post-John Wick world, where audiences not only expect full-on action, but they want it to be as lifelike as possible. And what’s more lifelike than literally just doing it for real?

So for one of the big action set pieces of the movie—the prison escape fight sequence, in which Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) takes a Molotov to the arm—Hemsworth was actually lit up like a bonfire. According to stunt coordinator-turned-director Hargrave, the team used a sequence of different fire-proof jackets with layers designed specifically to protect the global superstar from actually burning to a crisp while shooting the scene many times over. ^[1]

9 Living Birdcage: Batman Returns (1992)

We now live in the era of the superhero, where every movie has a unifying visual style and is part of a bigger story. Still, back in the latter decades of the last century, auteurs like Tim Burton put a unique spin on our favorite comic book heroes.

While nowadays, the stars are protected from overexertion by waivers and clauses, leaving multi-million-dollar CGI to do the heavy lifting, films like Burton’s Batman Returns tell a different story for how things used to be. Although a wealth of sets, practical effects, and stunt teams were used to bring much of the director’s dark, moody Gotham and its citizens to life, Michelle Pfeiffer was convinced to play her part to the hilt.

Starring as Catwoman, Pfeiffer committed to the physicality of the role, doing most of the whip-work and acrobatics herself. But it is her most static stunt that has our jaws on the floor. In a scene with Danny DeVito’s Penguin, Pfeiffer stuffed a live bird in her mouth and held it there for longer than strictly sanitary or safe. While insurers would hit the roof today, Burton shot the scene in one take, and the rest, as they say, is history.^[2]

8 Canary Island High-Speed Tank Chase: Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

While the Fast & Furious franchise has built itself a reputation for over-the-top, gravity- and logic-defying CGI sequences (they literally went to space!), a decade ago, Vin Diesel and company were still making action the old-fashioned way, stunts and all.

The sixth entry in the series sees Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and his extended “family” take on a well-financed and heavily armored mercenary organization, leading to a series of big action sequences involving cars, planes, and even a tank. But rather than calling the tech guys in to paint a fake one over the footage, director Justin Lin and his crew used the real thing, putting it to work on the roads of the Canary Islands.

Custom-built using a WWII Chieftain tank, the production team created a monster of a vehicle that weighed 60 tons and could travel at 60mph (96.5 km/h), with a whole brand-new stretch of highway to wreak (government-approved) havoc on. They even fired it for real out the front of a 30-ton truck… and it should go without saying the results speak for themselves.^[3]

7 Bees for Breakfast: Candyman (1992)

Drawn from horror legend Clive Barker’s dark psyche, the legend of Candyman has made restless nights for teenagers and adults alike across the past three decades. And, with three sequels to date, the hook-handed horror doesn’t show any signs of going away.

But the thing that makes Candyman so scary, and the single element that has ensured the series’ longevity, is Tony Todd’s iconic performance as the folklore phantom. This includes everything, from his deep, haunting whisper of a voice to his thousand-yard stare. Todd did as much as he could with the part, and that includes swallowing his pride and taking one for the team in the first film’s infamous scene where bees come out of Candyman’s chest, hands, and mouth.

Amazingly, 200,000 live bees were used in the scene, and rather than glue fakes to his face and hands or regurgitate a bee-like substance, Todd allowed bees to be placed all over him, including a swarm in his mouth. Lucky for him, the actor had a good lawyer, and they negotiated an additional $1,000 payment for each sting..^[4]

6 The Trinity Test: Oppenheimer (2023)

As one of the biggest films of 2023 and of director Christopher Nolan’s career, Oppenheimer offered audiences a uniquely contemplative yet equally bombastic look into the life and legacy of the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Cillian Murphy plays the misguided scientific genius from his college days through his rise and to his eventual fall from grace in the eyes of the public, the government, and even himself. Along the way, we are treated to the kind of all-out, ear-crushing spectacle Nolan is known for, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Trinity Test—the first detonation of a nuclear device.

While Nolan didn’t detonate a nuke, he did commit to shooting some major explosions for real to simulate one without the associated fallout. Working on location out in the desert in New Mexico, the largest explosion shot was created using stacks of 44-gallon fuel drums with high explosives rigged underneath them. Visual effects were used in post-production to string the shots of several different explosions together, but every eyebrow-scorching blast seen on screen was made for real.^[5]

5 Hood-Riding Car Battle: Death Proof (2007)

Created out of the adoration Quentin Tarantino holds for the grindhouse B-movie scene of the ’70s and ’80s, his exploitation flick Death Proof makes an art of its realer-than-real stunts. While the director is known for going old-school, shooting on film, and almost exclusively using practical effects in his films, this one takes things to another level. Lucky for everyone involved, Tarantino chose a bona fide, real-life stuntwoman—Zoe Bell—to play out the most extreme stunts caught on camera.

In the latter half of the film, Bell (playing a fictionalized version of herself) engages in a don’t-try-this-at-home game called Shipman’s Mast, riding the hood of a Dodge Challenger going at top speed. Tough enough, right? Far from content to leave things there, Tarantino had the film’s antagonist, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), attempt to ram her car off the road, with Bell still hanging on for dear life.

And every moment of it is real—Bell put her life on the line so the Pulp Fiction director could get his shots, and rather than take it slow and speed up the footage in post, they gunned the cars at 80-100mph (128-161 km/h) for the entire sequence.^[6]

4 222-Step Fall: John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Made by ex-stuntmen, the John Wick movies have been on a mission to go as traditional as possible with their action sequences, shooting in long, unbroken takes and choreographing the fights down to every last blow.

And series star Keanu Reeves has thrown himself in at the deep end every step of the way. But some things you can’t choreograph, like falling down a very long and very steep set of stairs—which is where the real stuntmen come in.

In Paris, 222 steps lead up Montmartre Hill to the famous basilica Sacre Coeur, and this is where director Chad Stahelski staged one of John Wick: Chapter 4’s most audacious and death-defying stunts. The scene sees Wick (Reeves) arriving at the foot of the staircase and having to battle an army of henchmen to reach the top in time for his dual with the main villain. Needless to say, he gets knocked, kicked, and tripped down the stairs several times. But in one painful sequence, as he has almost reached the top, he takes a tumble all the way back to the bottom. Vincent Bouillon, Reeves’ stunt double, bit the bullet and took the fall for real—twice over!^[7]

3 Anti-Gravity Hallway Fight: Inception (2010)

Seemingly determined to outdo himself with every subsequent film, Christopher Nolan nonetheless delivered a career-high with Inception that benefitted from a blend of mind-boggling sets, sparingly applied CGI, and some truly epic stunt work.

No scene is more impressive in this star-studded tour de force than the anti-gravity hallway fight. Stuck between dream levels in a hotel that is physically and metaphysically unstable due to the forces acting upon his body on the next level up (go with it, and it kind of makes sense), Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has to fight off a squad of goons while gravity and perspective shift around them.

Most directors would balk at the logistics of having to film something like this and instead use digital trickery, but Nolan opted instead to shoot the thing for real. Taking inspiration from the rotating structure used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he had his team construct two ginormous suspended hallway sets: a horizontal one capable of rotating 360 degrees, and a vertical, “zero-G” one capable of supporting stunt wires. Thus, Gordon-Levitt was suspended for a three-week shoot within a twisting, spinning set, gravity be damned!^[8]

2 Bungee Down a Dam: GoldenEye (1995)

The planets aligned when director Martin Campbell and star Pierce Brosnan came together on GoldenEye, the first of the ’90s James Bond movies and one of the best of the entire franchise. Keen to make his mark on the series from the get-go, Campbell went big and kicked things off with a pulse-pounding ten-minute sequence that begins on one of the craziest stunts of the franchise: a death-defying bungee jumping down a dam.

As the introduction of this new-and-improved 007 was crucial to setting the tone for the character and the film to follow, the sequence had to look as large and as real as possible. Stuntman Wayne Michaels got the honors of playing Brosnan’s part, plunging over 720 feet (220 meters) off Switzerland’s Verzasca Dam and breaking the record for the biggest fall of all time.

The stunt became so iconic that, due to popular demand, the dam was leased out to a commercial bungee jump operator soon after the film’s release. Thrill-seekers today are still making the same jump 007 made three decades ago.^[9]

1 Melee on the Orient Express: Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)

The Mission: Impossible film series has, in recent years, become synonymous with all-out action and crazy stunt work, thanks to star Tom Cruise’s increasingly voracious appetite for danger. As such, there are numerous unthinkable stunts from across the seven films that would make an ideal addition to this list—but we had to choose only one. And what better way to go than the train-top fight from the franchise’s latest installment, Dead Reckoning.

Mirroring the action of the first film, which culminates in Ethan Hunt (Cruise) fighting double agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) atop the TGV train from London to Paris, Dead Reckoning sees Hunt take on global terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales) on top of the Orient Express. Unlike the first film, however, they did it for real.

Director Christopher McQuarrie and his crew built a custom train that would allow for filming rigs and equipment and could actually function on a real track in Norway. The specially built locomotive was then able to travel at up to 60mph (96.5 km/h) during the shoot while both Cruise and Morales straddled the roof and sides, running and fighting while trying their best not to fall off.^[10]

While many movies have been set within asylums, most have not gone so far as to use real-life ones during the shooting of the film. This list comprises some examples of productions that decided to opt for authenticity in their locations, if not necessarily in their depictions of life and treatment at such institutions.

The following well-known and lesser-known movies all spend significant amounts of their run-time within real asylums, either during or after their closure, using the asylum setting as a key element to the stories they tell.

Related: Top 10 Mental Disorders Hollywood Gets Totally Wrong

10 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Milos Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel sets the benchmark for more realistic depictions of asylum life. Filmed at Oregon’s Salem State Hospital (opened in 1883), it turns its setting into a power struggle between the autonomy and rights of the individual and the order and restrictions of the state. The free-spirited individual is personified by Jack Nicholson’s new patient McMurphy, while Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched represents the coldly oppressive state and its unbreakable assurance that it always knows what’s best.

Produced by Michael Douglas, his father Kirk had bought the rights to the book and played the role of McMurphy in an earlier stage version. He intended to play McMurphy again in the movie but was too old by the time the much-delayed production began. The actors playing patients all slept in the ward used for filming, and real patients played extras seen around the asylum, as well as working as assistants during the shoot.

Shot on a tight budget, Nicholson took a percentage of profits for a reduced fee—a shrewd move as it became the fifth highest-grossing movie ever (at the time), with Nicholson and Fletcher winning Best Actor and Actress Oscars. It also won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.^[1]

9 Doom Asylum (1987)

Richard Friedman’s horror takes us to the opposite end of the quality scale, one of many movies to treat the asylum setting as little more than a background to increase the creepiness of its lurid premise.

A former coroner is disfigured in a car accident and taken to an asylum where he lives in the basement after its closure, reappearing to stalk and kill the hapless teenagers who hang out in the abandoned building. The movie leans hard into its teen slasher vibe, presenting the stereotypical selection of geeky, goofy, sexy, and nerdy teens so beloved to rental horror fodder of the ’80s. One character wanders around the asylum in only a bikini, and a gang of faux punk rockers ensures it feels absolutely a product of its unique era.

The effects are gory and inventive in places, if never particularly convincing. Although many areas of the asylum (Essex Mountain Sanatorium in Verona, NJ, opened in 1907) used are bare and unremarkable, others are quite atmospheric, decayed, and littered with rusty old medical equipment. Ultimately, Doom Asylum succeeds in passing its own low bar of exceedingly silly, “popcorn” entertainment due to not taking itself remotely seriously. ^[2]

8 Session 9 (2001)

Brad Anderson’s movie casts the asylum itself as both a key part of the story and as one of its core characters. In a perfect location coup, the production secured Massachusetts’s Danvers State Hospital (opened in 1878), felt by many to be among the most iconic asylums in the U.S. It closed in 1992 (the movie states 1985), and the immense Gothic building is shown looming beautiful and grandiose, imposing and malevolent, right from the opening scene.

Gordon (a compelling central performance by Peter Mullan) leads a small team pitching for the contract to remove asbestos from the old asylum, promising to get the job done on an unrealistically tight two-week schedule. They encounter strange occurrences before one of the team goes missing, sowing seeds of suspicion and leading to increased pressure on Gordon, who appears to be gradually losing his grip on reality.

One team member finds a stash of old tape interviews with a patient who appears to be either mad or perhaps even possessed. These numbered “sessions” gradually lead up to a final, more malevolent persona being revealed in tape session no.9, hinting at a possible influence on the characters’ actions. Session 9 is a slow-burning, cerebral work that only rarely relies on shock value to achieve its chills. The genuine abandoned asylum provides a rich, evocative setting, with its genuine history deftly woven in among the fiction, perhaps more effectively than in any other asylum-set movie.^[3]

7 Girl, Interrupted (1999)

Winona Ryder bought the rights to Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir, recruiting director James Mangold to film the 1960s-set story in which she would star as a young woman diagnosed with personality disorder and committed to an asylum.

Reimagined as Claymoore Hospital, the movie was actually shot at Harrisburg State Hospital in Pennsylvania, which opened in 1851 and closed in 2006. Great use is made of the authentic setting, dressed to look much as it would have during the era depicted.

While individual characters conveniently fit into some of the stereotypes associated with asylum patients, the film’s setting and autobiographical origins lend it extra authenticity. It stands as a rare attempt to humanize rather than exaggerate and exploit the behavior and illnesses of its patients.^[4]

6 Grave Encounters (2011)

A team of fake paranormal investigators spends the night in an abandoned asylum for a supernatural TV show in Colin and Stuart Ortiz’s debut. While “found-footage” horrors are ten-a-penny and ones set in asylums plentiful, Grave Encounters succeeds in providing uncomplicated shocks with a tight story, creepy visuals, and contemptible characters who gradually become more sympathetic as the terror of their situation sinks in.

We are shown the usual trickery of such shows, such as the cast arriving and immediately bribing a groundskeeper to pretend to have seen a ghost, wiring up doors to slam shut, and pretending to scream and jump at conveniently unseen apparitions. The premise for their show is that they will be locked inside the asylum overnight, and eventually, of course, increasingly strange things start to happen for real. While it doesn’t have anything to say about mental health, and the usual cliches are present, it does create an increasingly nightmarish scenario. Even the building itself appears to conspire against the team’s escape.

The asylum is referred to as Collingwood in Maryland, USA, but filming took place at Riverview Asylum in Coquitlam, Canada, which opened in 1913. Filming took place in disused areas, but it had not been empty long, hence the rather bland, modernized look, with little of the usual decay or damage. The found-footage approach and darkened hallways still conspire to create a creepy and claustrophobic atmosphere despite the lackluster setting.^[5]

5 Shutter Island (2010)

Martin Scorcese’s movie was adapted from the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane and sits somewhere between horror, psychological thriller, and police procedural. Two U.S. Marshals head out to Shutter Island (an anagram of “truths and lies”), dominated by the high-security Ashecliffe psychiatric hospital, to track down a murderous escaped patient but find they have unexpected personal links to the mysterious institution.

In reality, no asylum ever existed within the grounds of a war fortification. Still, the areas of the asylum itself are depicted accurately both inside and out, including details such as the grounds and solariums. Many external shots were composed at Medfield State Hospital in Massachusetts, which opened in 1896, and were composited with other locations and CGI to create the fictional asylum.^[6]

4 The Dead Pit (1989)

An exploitative horror shocker by Brett Leonard (who later directed The Lawnmower Man), this sees a stereotypical “mad doctor” psychiatrist who experiments on his patients in the asylum’s basement killed by another doctor who then seals him and his remaining patients in the basement. Twenty years later, a new patient suffering from amnesia is admitted and inexplicably triggers an earthquake that cracks open the old basement, allowing the now-revived mad doctor and his slavering, zombie-like patients to run riot across the facility.

While many external scenes were filmed elsewhere, the idiosyncratic clock tower and many internal scenes were shot at the former high-security wing of Agnew State Hospital in Milpitas, CA (opened in 1906), lending the movie its only elements of credibility. Its representation of asylum routine largely consists of the typical aggressive dosing-up and fetishized hosing-down of eccentrically depicted patients.

The day room where several scenes are shot was the same one used for Green Day’s 1994 “Basket Case” video.^[7]

3 Asylum (2005)

The author Patrick McGrath grew up in the long shadow of Broadmoor Criminal Asylum in Berkshire, UK, where his father was the Medical Superintendent, and mental illness is often worked into his books in some way. This is an adaptation of his 1996 novel of the same name.

The asylum featured is High Royds, at Menston, West Yorkshire, which opened in 1888 and only fully closed just two years before filming began. However, having been gradually disused over many years, the grounds and interiors were already somewhat overgrown and shabby. Filming during the fall, plants were spray-painted green to make it look more like the intended summer setting. High Royds was among the most spectacular and imposing of all British asylums. However, the interiors were modified slightly to appear more like an asylum for criminals (which it was not), including adding a barred iron gate to one of the corridors.

The movie stars Natasha Richardson, Marton Csokas, and Ian McKellen and addresses mental health, jealousy, adultery, and passion, albeit in a somewhat melodramatic and old-fashioned manner.^[8]

2 The Professor and the Madman (2019)

Sean Penn stars as William Minor, who was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Asylum in Berkshire, UK, in 1872 after shooting dead a man that his mental health problems had caused him to believe was stalking him. While in the asylum, Minor contributed more than any other single author to providing definitions for what would become the first Oxford English Dictionary.

While Farhad Safinia’s movie uses two buildings to double as Broadmoor, St. Ita’s Asylum in Ireland is used for the majority of the interior and exterior shots. The huge building spans a staggering 1,630 feet (497 meters) and was the largest building project of any type built in Ireland while under British jurisdiction. It opened as the Dublin District Asylum in 1903 and closed to patients in 2017.^[9]

1 Titicut Follies (1967)

Of all the films on this list, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary on Massachusetts’s Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane may be the most horrifying and upsetting of all, as it is all entirely real. His camera wanders the cells, corridors, surgeries, and grounds and often simply observes, occasionally allowing for interviews. It is an enthralling and appalling deep dive into both the minds, illnesses, and acts of the people incarcerated there and those of the staff, institutions, and wider society who felt this environment was a suitable place for human beings.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had the film banned outright, and it could only be legally shown to audiences composed of students and medical or legal practitioners until as late as 1992. The reason given was an “invasion of privacy” to those being filmed. However, many believed that the appalling scenes depicted and their reflection on the state’s provision were the primary motive.

Screened to the cast before filming began on several movies on this list, Wiseman’s passive camera and interviews allow patients and staff to speak largely unguided, staff often unwittingly damning themselves by their own uninterested attitudes to their work. Little vignettes tell sad or upsetting stories, such as the doctor who can’t be bothered to put his cigarette out even when force-feeding a patient on camera, dropping his ash down the tube. These images provide unvarnished insight into a broken and dysfunctional system from which meaningful rehabilitation seems almost impossible.^[10]